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India looks askance at Gates' AIDS
grant
By Ranjit Devraj
NEW
DELHI - A US$100 million grant to fight HIV/AIDS in
India, announced by the world's richest man Bill Gates
soon after he landed in the national capital on Monday,
has stirred controversy after policy makers voiced
concern of a suspected hidden US agenda behind the
largesse.
Speaking at a function - one of many
scheduled for him on his busy, four-day itinerary
covering the cities of Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bangalore -
Microsoft chairman Gates said that the money was the
"largest single initiative focused on a single country"
by the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation.
But
many are skeptical, among them India's Health Minister
Shatrughan Sinha who, speaking at a public function on
the weekend, denounced US ambassador Robert Blackwill's
attempts to promote US-led AIDS initiatives based on
kite-flying projections that India would have 25 million
AIDS sufferers by 2010.
Asked about the
government's questioning of the AIDS statistics, Gates,
during a visit to a voluntary agency where he met people
with HIV, said what was important was the disease and
not the figures.
Controversy has been building
since last Wednesday when Blackwill quoted the figures
from a report released recently by the US Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA). He also referred to $63
million spent by the United States for containment of
AIDS in India over the past five years.
According to the CIA report, the spread of AIDS
in India, Russia and China posed serious threats to
international health and the world's economy unless
urgent measures, including vaccination, were taken to
contain the disease in these countries.
In the
report, the three countries - together with Nigeria and
Ethiopia - are projected to outstrip sub-Saharan Africa
in the number of people living with AIDS by 2010. The
report says that an estimated 50 million to 75 million
people could be living with the disease.
Volunteer agencies, led by the Joint Action
Council, that work on human rights issues linked to
AIDS, wrote to Sinha demanding that the government take
a stand on the issue. In a pointed reference to
projections made separately by Gates and Blackwill,
Sinha said, "I fail to understand how people holding
such important positions can stand on our soil and say
that India will have 25 million sufferers of AIDS by
2010."
Sinha accused Gates and Blackwill of
spreading fear in India about AIDS and said that he
suspected that "false propaganda" was being used to help
the interests of transnational corporations and people
who were against India's "safety and security".
Possibly as a reaction to the controversy
generated by the issue, Indian Prime Minister Atal
Bihari Vajpayee did not show up at a high-power lunch on
Monday with Gates, who instead went to meet him briefly
at his residence. Sinha, too, declined to meet Gates and
flew to the bustling port city of Mumbai, where the
former film star is partly based.
Earlier this
year, the health ministry said that 3.97 million people
were infected with the virus that could lead to AIDS.
The figures, derived from a report by the ministry's
Sentinel Surveillance Survey, said that the spread of
the virus had been contained.
Meenakshi Dutt
Ghosh, project director for the National AIDS Control
Organization, said in a televised interview on Monday,
"We have no idea how these [CIA] figures were arrived at
... going by the Sentinel Surveillance Survey, 10.9
million people could be suffering from AIDS by 2010."
In the past, the ministry has expressed extreme
annoyance at figures released by UN agencies that
differed from its own. For example, the ministry
objected to figures released by such agencies in 2000
which said that 310,000 Indians had died of AIDS in
India the previous year, but did not care to explain how
that figure was arrived at. The figures were later
retracted.
Said Dr C P Thakur, Sinha's immediate
predecessor as health minister. "No agency has the means
to calculate epidemiological statistics in this country
or the authority to release them to the public."
But different international agencies have
continued to cite other statistics on how many Indians
are dead or dying from AIDS. "Every year we update our
information and we are surprised to see other figures
cited freely," Sinha said.
Gates said that the
$100 million grant would be used for program that focus
on mobile populations, such as truck drivers and migrant
laborers who are considered to be at higher risk of
acquiring and spreading AIDS.
Last year, Gates'
foundation issued a $100 million challenge grant to the
UK-based International AIDS Vaccine Initiative that has
since signed an agreement with the Indian government to
develop a vaccine to specifically target prevalent
strains in this country.
In interviews given to
Indian publications ahead of his tour, Gates declared
that as with his software company Microsoft Corp, the
key to his charity was the large number of smart people
that were attracted to it and that had formed
"partnerships".
Ethnic Indians form 20 percent
of Microsoft Corp's engineering force and Gates said
that this led him to have a special interest in India, a
country he is visiting for the fifth time and where the
company maintains software development centers.
To help cement this position in the country,
Gates agreed on Tuesday to provide assistance of $1
million for the Media Lab Asia project of the
government, besides extending $20 million for an
e-learning initiative called "Shiksha". Gates made the
commitments during an hour-long meeting with
Communications and IT Minister Pramod Mahajan.
Mahajan had earlier explained the purpose and
idea behind the Media Lab Asia project to Gates and
expressed hope that with Microsoft extending assistance
to it, more international funds would find their way
into the socio-economic project. Under the Shiksha
project, the Microsoft assistance will involve the
training of 80,000 teachers, along with 3.5 million
students, over a three to five year period. The project
will be coordinated by the department of IT.
(Inter Press Service)
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